The Eloquence of Blood (6 page)

Charles picked himself up from an elaborate fall and bowed deeply to Brunet while rubbing his posterior and grimacing at the audience. Then the two of them opened the door of a large cupboard standing onstage, revealing a tall wooden barrel.

“How do you fare, Brother Cellarer?” Charles shouted, addressing himself to the pair of square-toed black shoes sticking up from the barrel. He turned to the audience. “What do you think,
mes pères et mes frères
? If Brother Cellarer promises never to water our wine again, shall we pull him out?”

Shouts of “Yes!” and “No!” drowned each other.

“Come and help me, then!”

That was the cue for a half dozen Jesuits to leap onto the stage. They pulled the red-faced and realistically dripping mathematics professor playing Brother Cellarer out of the barrel and set him on his feet. He swore by Bacchus, classical god of the grape, never to so much as mention water in the same breath with wine, and everyone onstage joined in what began as a
gigue
and ended as a hilarious rout. Père Montville, former assistant rector and now the newly appointed college principal, provided the accompaniment, sawing joyously on a squawking violin.

Then Père Damiot, the farce's beaming author, walked downstage to speak the verse epilogue. His rich voice filled the chamber and the audience quieted to listen.

There was long applause and more laughter, and then lay brothers began clearing away the benches and setting out jugs of wine and trays of refreshments along one side of the chamber. The cast and Damiot left by the door through which Charles had chased Frère Brunet and shed the brown monks' robes they'd worn over their Jesuit cassocks.

Straight-faced, Charles said to Damiot, “Think they liked it at all?”

“No. They were only laughing at your left-footed dancing.”

They grinned at each other and went back to the noisy chamber in search of wine and food. Carrying cone-shaped glasses and small sweet cakes shaped like the animals at the Christmas manger, they made their way through a barrage of teasing and compliments to a relatively quiet corner.

“To your immortal prose,” Charles said, raising his glass to Damiot.

“To your two left feet,” Damiot replied.

They drank and looked sadly at the pale reddish wine in their glasses.

“Watered,” Charles said.

“Very. But I suppose we're lucky it's not straight river water.”

Charles drank again. The stuff was, at least, discernibly wine. “Why do you suppose our finances are suddenly so bad?”

“Cash is scarce.” Damiot tended to know these things, because his father was a wealthy merchant goldsmith. “All those fleeing Huguenots have drained us of so much money and skill. I continually ask myself how heretics can be such good businessmen.” He shrugged. “Even gold itself is scarce. Silver, too.”

“Surely that is not the Huguenots' fault.” Charles knew more than a little about the French Protestants called Huguenots, some of his own family in the south being counted among them.

Damiot drank and scowled at his glass. “In any case, the New World mines aren't producing like they used to. Or Spain is keeping it all, who knows? What anyone with two thoughts to rub together does know is that war against the Augsburg Alliance countries is inevitable, and war always means new taxes. And what will a new war do to trade? Prices will no doubt go up. And if the next few grain harvests are not good—” He shrugged. “I imagine that those who have something put aside are keeping it.”

“Too bad our king is more concerned with war and glory than with the well-being of his own realm and people,” Charles said grimly.

Damiot's eyes widened, and he glanced around to see who might be close by. “That's fascinatingly close to treason. I don't think I heard that.”

“But I said it,” Charles muttered. “And it's not treason, it's reason.”

“Here.” Damiot shoved an ox-shaped cake into his friend's hand. “You can't talk with your mouth full.” They gave their attention to eating and drinking. In the rumble of talk around them, Charles caught the words of two priests.

“. . . but
I
heard,” the older one said eagerly, “that a demon nearly carried away the reliquary!”

“No, no, just some deranged old beggar, probably an old soldier with a grudge against the Condé. Trying to steal the box and sell it, I imagine.”

“But Père Pinette would have had a mere mortal—beggar, soldier, what have you—arrested! Explain that!”

A burst of laughter from somewhere covered his companion's response. Charles shook his head and swallowed the last of his cakes.

“I suppose,” he said to Damiot, “that our rector looks so happy tonight because of this rumored bequest.”

“The prospect of no more bean pottage in the refectory is enough to make anyone look happy.”

Charles sighed in mock despair. “And there was I, hoping that Père Le Picart was smiling because he liked my performance.”

“Don't be ridiculous. It was my script he was liking!”

“In fact, it was all of those,” a light dry voice said behind them.

They turned and bowed to Père Jacques Le Picart, rector of Louis le Grand. The lean and wiry son of a Norman farmer, Le Picart ruled his college with shrewd justice and a warm heart. His cool gray gaze often saw more than a man wanted seen, as Charles had learned last summer when his vocation had hung in the balance.

Le Picart smiled at Damiot. “I greatly enjoyed your play,
mon père
. And your performance,” he said, turning to Charles. “In fact, I was marveling that you joined us and not the Opera,” he added with gentle mockery.

Charles bowed his thanks, wondering if Le Picart realized how seriously he'd once thought of choosing the stage—in spite of what that choice would have cost him in parental fury. But then the musket ball tore through his shoulder at the battle of St. Omer, leaving permanent damage and changing everything. The loss of his stage dream had been his gain, in the end, because it had shown him what he really wanted. Though he rarely said it aloud, his deepest wish was to come as close to God as a man could. But he wanted to do it in God's good world, not behind cloister walls. That desire had led him to the Society of Jesus and the teaching of Latin rhetoric. Which had, in God's odd economy, restored dance to him.

“I wish Père Jouvancy were here,” Le Picart said. “He would have been very pleased with you both.”

Charles said, “He brings the boys back from Gentilly on Sunday?”

“Yes.” Le Picart sipped his wine in silence and then raised an ironic eyebrow at Charles. “As I have already said, Maître du Luc, you were perfectly correct, I was also smiling tonight over the welcome bequest coming to us.
Le bon Dieu
and all the saints must be growing weary of my unceasing thanks.”

“Can you tell us who the bequest comes from?” Damiot said diffidently.

“From the family of one of our own, Père Christophe Mynette, who taught here until his death many years ago. Before Christmas, a week or two back, Frère Brunet went to the apothecary in the Place Maubert to replenish his stock of medicines. The apothecary mentioned that Père Mynette's niece, the last Mynette relative, had died. May God receive her soul.”

Le Picart and Père Damiot crossed themselves, but Charles stood motionless, staring at the rector.

“Did you say Mynette,
mon père
?”

“He did,” Damiot said. “I remember old Père Mynette, poor soul. My father knew him. I was still in the Novice House here in Paris, and there was a terrible epidemic of the little pox. It took Père Mynette among the first. Understandable, since he must have been eighty or so.”

“With the passing of Père Mynette's niece, Anne Mynette, the Mynette family dies out,” the rector said. “Otherwise, of course, the family fortune could not come to us.”

“
Mon père
,” Charles began reluctantly, but the rector talked over him.

“Monsieur Simon Mynette, who was Père Mynette's younger brother, was a well-off lawyer, and always very proud of his older brother's Jesuit vocation. Jesuits, of course, cannot personally inherit money, but Monsieur Simon Mynette promised that after his daughter Anne's death, the Mynette money would come to the college in Père Christophe Mynette's honor. Anne Mynette, you see, never married and there were no other relatives. No, I lie. I believe there was one other, but he went out to the New World and died there. We have, of course, very carefully kept Monsieur Simon Mynette's notarized letter explaining all that and laying out what we can expect. I have summoned the notary who drew it up, but he has not yet answered me.”

Charles tried again. “Is Mynette a common name?”

Damiot and Le Picart looked at him in surprise.

“Common enough, I suppose,” the rector said. “Why?”

“Because this morning, when I called on Monsieur Callot from the bourgeois Congregation of the Sainte Vierge, I met a young woman with that surname. Her Christian name is Martine, and she is a friend of Monsieur Callot's great-niece. This Martine Mynette is an adopted child, and the woman who adopted her, one Anne Mynette, died recently. The girl is distraught because the
donation entre vifs
, by which her mother left her the Mynette fortune, cannot be found.”

The rector looked as though someone had slapped him. “And where does this girl live?” he said, when he could get words out.

“In the Place Maubert, at the Sign of the Rose.”

“That was Simon Mynette's house.” Le Picart drained his wineglass and stared narrow-eyed at the wall, as though unpleasant sums were written on the plaster. “This
donation
—did the girl say who drew it up? And when?”

“She didn't say when. Monsieur Callot's nephew drew it up, a notary whose surname is Brion, I don't know his Christian name.”

Le Picart's face darkened with anger. “Brion? The notary who witnessed and sealed our letter from Simon Mynette promising us the bequest was Monsieur Henri Brion. He lived near the Place. There cannot be two notaries there called Brion. Why in God's name did the man not tell us about the
donation
? That is inexcusable! And his behavior since Mademoiselle Anne Mynette died is also inexcusable. I have sent him message after message, and he sends polite nothing-saying messages back, but he does not come to tell me how things stand with the money.”

“But
mon père
,” Damiot said, spreading his arms and sloshing wine onto the floor. “Maître du Luc has said that the
donation
is lost. Which one must feel is only just, if this Anne Mynette really flouted her father's wishes so brazenly by adopting an orphan, a child of some other blood, and trying to give it the Mynette fortune. I feel strongly that one should not be allowed to do that with a family
patrimoine
.”

“How can you say this loss is just?” Charles shot back, stung on Martine Mynette's behalf. “Plainly, Mademoiselle Anne Mynette came to have other wishes about the money after her father and her Jesuit uncle were dead. And why shouldn't she? I think you must not have sisters,
mon père
.”

Damiot blinked. “Sisters? No. What does that have to do with it? What matters is that the paper is lost. So where is our difficulty? There is no impediment in the way of the bequest.”

Le Picart frowned at Damiot but said nothing. Charles could almost see his thoughts moving behind his eyes.

“Maître du Luc,” the rector said, “you know Monsieur Callot. I want you to go back to him tomorrow morning—and go alone; I don't want word of this getting out yet. For the sake of absolute certainty, find out the name of this deceased Anne Mynette's father and whether she had a Jesuit uncle. Then find out when this alleged
donation
was made. When I am certain of those facts, I will confront our elusive notary Henri Brion.”

“Exactly,” Damiot said, nodding vigorously. “
Alleged
is exactly the word! Do we really believe that the Châtelet clerks are so careless as to lose a
donation entre vifs
?”

“I believe they are all too human, Père Damiot.” The rector fixed him with a hard gray stare. “Like all of us. Are you saying we should simply disregard this Mynette girl and her claim? Assuming she can substantiate it. Are you so eager to be done with bean pottage that you would not choke on fraud? Until we know whether there was a
donation
—and if there was, that it is truly lost—we will do nothing.”

“No,
mon père
, but if—”

“We will not defraud the girl, don't even think it. More than that, don't tempt me to it!” The rector rubbed a hand over his face. “Because God knows, the money means a great deal to us. A dozen more scholarships for promising boys from poor families. Finishing repairs to the old college of Les Cholets building we've bought for more classrooms. A doubled alms budget for the student Congregations of the Sainte Vierge. And, yes, we would eat less bean pottage. And if this money does
not
come to us, not only will those things not happen, the figures in the bursar's ledger will force me to raise rents on houses we own. And the tenants cannot afford it.” Le Picart looked grimly at Charles. “Report to me the moment you return tomorrow.” Then his face softened a little and he said, “I wish this happy evening had ended more cheerfully. I thank you both again for the pleasure you gave to us.” He gave Damiot the ghost of a smile. “I should tell you that I, too, loathe bean pottage.”